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spoaceman7777

614 karma · joined March 5, 2023

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spoaceman7777··on Show HN: AegisKernel – Zero-trust POSIX runtime for AI agents in <0.016ms
yeahhh...
spoaceman7777··on Show HN: AegisKernel – Zero-trust POSIX runtime for AI agents in <0.016ms
Hmm. It's definitely an interesting idea. Though, from my read of what's in the main branch of the repo, you may perhaps be overselling what exactly the system is capable of, and what policy enforcement it's doing (and at what level)... a bit...
spoaceman7777··on "I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math
No. It's just people who built an identity on the power that their intelligence afforded them. We view that power and the intelligence itself as the same thing, but they're actually separate.
spoaceman7777··on "I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math
Will AI be unable to produce new conjectures?
spoaceman7777··on Butlerian Jihad
Grand fiction requires conflict, suffering, and war, so banning AI is a necessary plot device.

People keep putting the cart before the horse on this one, and the degree to which modern people have been lulled by fiction is quite worrying. Amusing ourselves to death.

spoaceman7777··on LFM2.5-24B-A2B: Built for fast on-device agents
I'd guess it's mostly just an artifact of the strength of their Agentic RL environments for those specific domains. If they had the same kind of access to massive amounts of institutional software knowledge, compute infrastructure, and hundreds of millions of users dropping them endless highly technical agent traces, there may have been similar disparities on the agentic benchmarks in other fields.

It's possible that they may have generally capped out for some reason... but, I'd rather be bullish on a new American AI lab making it to first place among western open-weight models that can run on a common consumer device. (Closest in size that's better across that range of benchmarks is Inkling-Small I think, at 276B params, unless I'm forgetting someone.)

spoaceman7777··on Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel
The threshold for Microsoft and Apple to actually report vulnerabilities is MUCH MUCH higher than for Linux, and open source as a whole. They generally only disclose issues in Windows and macOS that are quite serious and impactful.

For Linux, the threshold is nearer to the point of it being questionable whether a bug is even exploitable on a real production distro, compiled and run with any sort of sane configuration.

spoaceman7777··on OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields
If you scroll past the first 99 pages of explaining how urls work, you'll find the author includes this as its first FAQ:

"""

Was this hacking?

I don't think I'd call it that.

"""

It's really irresponsible to give credence to these increasingly ridiculous claims of "hacking", that almost certainly look like things you yourself have typed into url bars at one time or another, if you are at all competent with a computer.

Do we really wants laws regulating which locations it is appropriate to type alert(1)? Like.. lord.

Do folks have any idea what browser extensions look like? Let alone browser extension development. Anyone here ever read the logs of a production system that actually hosts a service people use?

This is reality. This is how the internet works. And pretending otherwise is either dishonesty or ignorance.

spoaceman7777··on Turbovec – Google's TurboQuant for vector search in Rust
Well. That is insane. O_O Fantastic job!
spoaceman7777··on The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
The moderation team stuff was largely unrelated to tech stuff, and was specifically involved with politics and ideological HR-style cancellation discourse.

One of the most notable actions of the team was managing a protest against defense companies assisting the project.

Its disbanding was just another instance of the well documented, and statistically supported, end of the cancellation committee trend that rapidly took off in 2021, peaked in 2023, and has nearly fully receded into oblivion since then.

The backlash against that trend, while not communicated publicly by most (far-right folks excluded...), has been massive, but handled tactfully, behind the scenes. Always important to remember that the equity-left is only about 20% of Americans, and the US is the global stronghold for such ideals. (That 20% makes quite a bit of noise, which gives many the impression that there are many more than there actually are. The reality is just that most people are polite, and don't want to get involved in discourse where their opinions could lead to them facing dramatic negative consequences.)

The global community has not been supportive of the continuing of the trend. So it's not just pushback from the (largely polite) majority of those in the English-speaking world that gave the whole situation a fair shake.

Anyway, to reiterate: the moderation team's disbanding had just about nothing to do with technical aspects of the project, and it could be argued that its disbanding was potentially a positive sign for stability.

spoaceman7777··on Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library
Blocking access only hurts people who follow the rules. Unblocking access lets them compete with those who break the rules.

I think the right choice is pretty clear...

spoaceman7777··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
Depending on the provider, GLM-5.2 is between 4.5-5x cheaper than Opus. You can compare prices/speed/etc. for basically all relevant models on aa https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2/providers
spoaceman7777··on Wikipedia Workers to Seek Union Recognition
well, i do! >:D ;)
spoaceman7777··on Wikipedia Workers to Seek Union Recognition
The charge against him is specifically "Stealth canvassing", which, beyond the use of the word "Stealth", is clarified several times as: """Stealth canvassing: Contacting users off-wiki (by e-mail, IRC, or Discord, for example) to persuade them to join in discussions (unless there is a specific reason not to use talk pages)"""

Between calling it "stealth" and specifically calling out email/IRC/Discord, it makes it pretty clear that it is not referring to public platforms.

Iterpreting it as a ban on any public discussion of Wikipedia by Wikipedia editors, anywhere on the public internet, is a very dishonest move by the people involved in that thread, and you can tell the real reason for it by reading the many comments simply lobbing politically charged accusations against him.

Seeing folks over there policing violations of taboos that are enforced by a very small minority of the English speaking world (around 15-25% of the US for the combined equity-progressives and further left groups) makes me worry about this wonderful site, which has taught me so much over the years :(

spoaceman7777··on Wikipedia Workers to Seek Union Recognition
Wow, they're on a roll over there. Just two days ago they permanently banned the cofounder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger.

Per his tweet: "Well, that’s that—I’ve been blocked by Wikipedia “indefinitely” for unstated reasons, by the “consensus” of a mob. There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law. All my judges were self-selected and hated me."

Link to his June 22nd tweet on the matter: https://x.com/lsanger/status/2069061483422425287

spoaceman7777··on Vulnerability reports are not special anymore
Have you considered having an agent, or just a model, classify/triage them for you? Modern problems require modern solutions.
spoaceman7777··on Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
Am I imagining things, or are all of the "vaguely pro-AI" comments being brigaded into oblivion?

I can't remember ever seeing this many reasonable posts being downvoted to the point of greying out.

spoaceman7777··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
I mean... Tiktok's hallmark trend has always been people doing "TikTok dances", which involve audio, so...

But, besides that, TikTok became the titan it is today during the pandemic. When everyone was indoors (not outside).

Per Google's quick answer, when searching "When did TikTok get really popular?": "TikTok's global popularity surged in 2020 due to pandemic lockdowns, with consistent growth since 2016, surpassing competitors in downloads by 2018."

spoaceman7777··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
That's just a standard disclaimer.

This is just how it is out there. Ask teachers what students are like these days. Think about designing for users. Or cross-reference with other info on this topic.

And, in regard to colleges... you have to keep in mind just how many colleges there are, how much the quality differs, the relative workloads of different degrees. There are a lot of people graduating with a GPA quite close to 2.0 at that full range too.

Also, think of how many college graduates never finish a book again after graduating college. Those numbers judge 18 to 65. And the age stats show that the older cohorts drag the scores down significantly.

The only upside to all of this is that it at least makes the chaos out there in the world make a bit more sense.

spoaceman7777··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
Just getting to the point of using a voice mode is a challenge at that level. Like, we're talking about "has trouble formulating a question to ask in the first place".

There's a whole level of ignorance out there that is honestly dumbfounding to even comprehend. The numbers for numeracy and problem solving are even more horrifying.

(It's for this reason that the most popular apps in the US are algorithmically generated feeds of photos, and often-non-verbal videos shorter than a TV advertisement.)

spoaceman7777··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
It's important to factor in just how many US adults are basically illiterate nowadays.

As of 2023, 27% of American working-age adults were at a PIAAC Literacy Level of 1 or below, out of a total of 5 levels. This has gotten drastically worse in the past 10 years as, in 2013, Level 1 and below was only 17%.

Full scores for 2023 are: % Level 1 or below: 27% Level 2: 29% Level 3: 31% Level 4/5: 13%

For reference, Level 1 means someone can't really handle a full page of text, and can sort of handle simple 1-page web pages. Level 2 is the point where someone can start to handle a few pages of straightforward text, but still nothing particularly complicated.

(Both of those descriptions undersell just how bad it really is, but I'll leave it at that, for the sake of brevity.)

People that aren't using AI at all often aren't using it because they effectively can't. On a fundamental level.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

spoaceman7777··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
It seems pretty obvious at this point that Anthropic intentionally developed a malicious cyberweapon AI simply to scare people.

Like, they even apparently recreated that old news-headline bug where the LLM starts speaking in symbols and secret language, and are pretending like it isn't just a bug that is a sign of them screwing up.

It's really frustrating that they're trying to get people to take them seriously with all of this. Like, they even went and named Mythos after an HP Lovecraft monster. It's shameless.

spoaceman7777··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
"Divided" is a bit of a strong word.

The true state of things is that the anti-AI folks are FAR more vocal about their opposition, meanwhile, the people who like AI are busy being productive and accomplishing a truly staggering amount of work.

The 84% stack overflow "currently use AI" number from a _year_ ago almost certainly still holds true today. Just look at the absurdly long and very incomplete list of "tainted by AI" projects that the list-making activists are maintaining over on Codeberg. Software is not "divided", it is simply being occupied by angry protesters.

Hacker news skews significantly older and whiter, and the blogs and such that circulate come primarily from the "established" English-speaking old-guard "white people" software days. Opposition to AI is highly concentrated among the white, first world, left-wing, established engineers.

This group punches far their weight in terms of the volume of their activism compared to the actual percentages of humans on earth.

That's all it is. Anti-AI hatred is just a noisy echo-chamber of those who are privileged enough to not need to modernize their skills.

spoaceman7777··on I don't think AI will make your processes go faster
I'm sure this take will age well.
spoaceman7777··on Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format
More acronyms?? What the heck is an XKCD??? ;)
spoaceman7777··on Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs
Free, downloadable AI models have consistently caught up to ChatGPT within 3 months, for almost a year now.

I highly encourage you to go and update your priors.

spoaceman7777··on My first impressions on ROCm and Strix Halo
I'm somewhat confused as to why this is on the front page. It doesn't go into any real detail, and the advice it gives is... not good. You should definitely not be quantizing your own gguf's using an old method like that hf script. There are lots of ways to run LLMs via podman (some even officially recommended by the project!). The chip has been out for almost a year now, and its most notable (and relevant-to-AI) feature is not mentioned in this article (it's the only x86_64 chip below workstation/server grade that has quad-channel RAM-- and inference is generally RAM constrained). I'm also quite puzzled about this bit about running pytorch via uv.

Anyway. I wouldn't recommend following the steps posted in there. Poke around google, or ask your friendly neighborhood LLM for some advice on how to set up your Strix Halo laptop/desktop for the tasks described. A good resource to start with would probably be the unsloth page for whichever model you are trying to run. (There are a few quantization groups that are competing for top-place with gguf's, and unsloth is regularly at the top-- with incredible documentation on inference, training, etc.)

Anyway, sorry to be harsh. I understand that this is just a blog for jotting down stuff you're doing, which is a great thing to do. I'm mostly just commenting on the fact that this is on the front page of hn for some reason.

spoaceman7777··on New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
Yep. Apple sells 5k displays, which work fine.

Just another case of Apple intentionally going against established open standards to price gouge their users.

I wouldn't mind it as much if I didn't have to hear said users constantly moaning in ecstasy about just how much better "Apple's way" is.

High quality desktop Linux has been made real by KDE, and the AI-fueled FOSS development boom is accelerating this eclipse of proprietary nonsense like this.

If you're a developer, you should be using a system that isn't maintained by a company that intentionally stabs developers in the back at every turn. (Unless you're into that. U do u.)

spoaceman7777··on Self-improving software won't produce Skynet
This assumes that it will only be scrupulous software engineers using these systems. Which is anything but the case.

Not to mention the many tales from Anthropic's development team, OpenClaw madness, and the many studies into this matter.

AI is a force of nature.

(Also, this article reeks of AI writing. Extremely generic and vague, and the "Skynet" thing is practically a non-sequitur.)

spoaceman7777··on Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
You're absolutely right. It's not just a matter of what you post-- it's a matter of how you post
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